


dulce et decorum est

by melodiousmadrigals



Series: wondertrev week 2020 [2]
Category: Wonder Woman (Movies - Jenkins)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Don't copy to another site, F/M, Introspection, Soldiers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:14:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25177516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melodiousmadrigals/pseuds/melodiousmadrigals
Summary: Wondertrev Loveweek Day 2: SoldierSteve Trevor was not always a soldier, but circumstances make him one.
Relationships: background Diana (Wonder Woman)/Steve Trevor
Series: wondertrev week 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1830868
Comments: 7
Kudos: 24
Collections: Wondertrev Week 2020





	dulce et decorum est

**Author's Note:**

> No beta we die valiantly (mistakes my own).
> 
> Title from the 1920 poem about WWI by Wilfred Owen of the same name. 
> 
> Inspired by the fact that Steve has clearly been part of the War for ~a while~ despite the US only entering in April of 1917. 
> 
> PS: This is technically canon-compliant, but as a rule I only write Steve Lives stories, so...you can decide for yourself whether you want this to just be a little pre-battle character study or the precursor to a canon divergence where Steve lives. I know which one I'm choosing! ;)

Steve Trevor was not always a soldier. 

("I already tried doing nothing," he tells Diana, in the glow of a magical underground hot-spring. There was a clear _before,_ a line drawn between that Steve and this one.)

* * *

_Nothing_ isn't quite the word. The United States wasn't involved in the War, at that point. He wasn't involved either, but there wasn't yet a reason for him to be. Instead, Steve was sitting for his doctorate in engineering at a little school called Boston Tech, taking advantage of the brand-new curriculum in aeronautical engineering they were offering on the side. (Steve marveled at aeroplanes even before he linked up with the Royal Air Force to become a pilot.) The War existed, of course, but on the periphery of his consciousness. He got to follow it in the newspapers like any other American, and forget about it when he so chose.

And then the RMS Lusitania goes down, and Steve's older brother goes down with it. 

He's in London before the month is out. There are moments he thinks the grief might kill him, swallow him whole. Joining up might not be the answer, might not provide the solace he's looking for, but at least it's something. He already tried nothing, see? 

* * *

Steve proves to be absolutely ace with aeroplanes. He's got the drive and the academic background, and that's really all he needs, at first. The rush he gets flying planes almost makes him forget his pain, and he outflies all the other trainees in his group. 

He gets reconnaissance missions initially, serves as eyes in the sky, spying on German positioning and reporting back to British Intelligence. Steve has a knack for getting lower and closer than the others in his cohort, and still managing to avoid the hostile fire. But this is war, and things never go right for very long. 

His plane gets shot down. (It's the first time he cheats death during the War, but it's far from the last.) 

His plane gets shot down over enemy territory, and he survives not only the crash, but the subsequent escape from behind the German battle line. He comes back with a trove of information, the position of troops, of High Command, of anecdotes from the German soldiers he meets who think nothing of his barely-there accent because if anything it sounds a little Hungarian. 

And suddenly, British Intelligence realizes what an asset they have on their hands. An ace pilot, a competent engineer, smooth-talking and fluent in three languages (courtesy of his immigrant mother who insisted on speaking the languages of her youth with her children), smart and brash and green—too naive, still—and yearning to make a difference. 

They make him a spy. 

* * *

But this is war, and there's no delineation between soldier and spy, not really. For all that he goes on intelligence missions, he also ends up in the trenches, sometimes, waiting for a contact, or traveling days on foot to a point where it's safe to cross. He braces himself next to men who have been there a year, and then two and three and four, as shells explode so close that the earth shakes violently and dirt and debris spray down on them, even as they barely gain an inch. He hears the cries of the women and children forced to take shelter in forgotten bits of trench because the War has swallowed their villages (the men are already long gone, dead or drafted into the fight elsewhere). He watches as men lose toes and blood and limbs and less tangible bits of themselves. 

Indeed, he gets shot—a flesh wound; he's lucky, if luck still exists here—and sees the deepest of sufferings in a makeshift hospital where men shudder with every breath, lungs destroyed by mustard gas, where the cries of the infirm ring out at all hours, like tortured bells tolling the loss of limb and life. 

He becomes a soldier not by choice but by necessity. He learns the art of the machine gun when the chap manning it beside him drops between the space of one heartbeat and the next, a stray bullet between his eyes and his blood blossoming on the soil below. He knew how to shoot before—grew up on a ranch, after all—but he learns the difference between shooting a steer and shooting a man. (If you're not careful, if you're not _looking,_ the difference evaporates all too quickly.) He learns how to drop bombs from planes and turn his tricky manoeuvres into evading anti-aircraft fire. 

He makes friends, comrades, brothers-in-arms in almost every place he ends up, and watches most of them die. He almost dies himself a couple of times, but he scrapes his way out. (He comes back with a little less hope, a little less of _himself,_ every time.) 

It's like nothing he's ever seen. It's like the world is going to end. He does what he has to in order to survive. And that's to be a—

 _Soldier._ What a dirty word, what a venomous concept.

Steve Trevor is not a soldier. 

But he becomes one. 

* * *

Steve Trevor's eyes are a thousand years old by the time he crashes on Themyscira. He wants the War to be over, desperately hopes the information he has will help achieve those ends, but he can't picture it. Can't believe it. 

By the time he meets Diana, he can barely remember what a normal life looks like, much less imagine one for himself. ( _I have no idea,_ he says, when she asks him about why people get married. He's been a soldier so long that he's forgotten how to hope for something else.) 

But the funny thing—the funny thing is that shortly after he meets her, he begins to feel the faintest flutterings of something foreign rattling around in his chest. It takes him several days to realize it's a spark of _hope,_ bright and pure, reminding him of everything he was and still could yet be. 

_They will be good men again and the world will be better,_ she insists, and even though he brushes her off, for a moment, he lets himself believe it could really be that simple. Could he be good again, too, he wonders? 

_This is wonderful! You should be very proud,_ she tells the ice cream vendor, and he feels a smile burst onto his own face, completely unbidden. Life used to be about simple pleasures, he thinks, and it's not even a thought tinged in bitterness, poisoned by a darker reality, but rather something that he realizes might one day be true again. 

_No, but it's what I'm going to do,_ she says, before stepping into No Man's Land and defeating an entire battalion of Germans despite every gun pointed at her, freeing Veld in the process. She could do this, he thinks; she might really end the war. It might not go on forever. 

_I have no idea,_ he says, again, when she asks him what it's like when there are no wars to fight, but it's not quite the truth. He's starting to imagine. He's starting to imagine and the picture comes into sharper focus as he watches the grin on her face as she marvels at the snowflakes, as he hears her peals of laughter, as he touches her face in the low, flickering light. 

There might be a future, a world without war, a world where guns are unnecessary and leisurely breakfasts are commonplace and soldiers can be engineers or husbands or professors or farmers or fathers instead. 

He became a soldier, but he can become someone else, something else. Maybe he can become that something with Diana, if the Fates are kind. He's never believed they are, but looking at Diana in the soft morning light of Veld, he believes that maybe this time they will be. Without his authorization, the hope within him has grown into a huge, beautiful, flickering flame, because he might be a soldier now, it's true, but no one is ever just one thing.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact! Boston Tech (called so until 1916; now MIT) was a struggling institution at the time, trying to compete with the better-funded Lawrence Scientific School (of Harvard). They did, however, have the first aeronautical engineering curriculum in the country in 1914, in which I've decided Steve completed some coursework.


End file.
